Mountains in the Vuelta

[Libertine Seguros]

Yes but the Tour had much harder stages throughout the race and saved the hardest stages for the end to keep the suspense. It is likely that in this Vuelta we will be crowning the new champion today or at the latest on Wednesday at Pena Carbarga.

The Tour had 15 seconds' worth of GC differences not caused by crashes or the TTT before we got to stage 12. The Tour is all about engineering the close finale by making absolutely certain that nothing relevant will happen before then.

The Vuelta's Basque stages are poorly designed and a huge letdown, of that there can be no doubt. But let's not get misty-eyed about the Tour for being exciting at the end, because it was like a 0-0 football game that is going absolutely nowhere until both teams realise ten minutes from the end of extra time that they don't fancy a penalty shootout.

 

[roundabout]

going back to the point of this thread yesterdays stage showed that having a real climb before the final 1 means that time differences are going to be bigger than on the usual Unipublic 1 climb stage.

also having a climb where only the last 5-6 km are really tough is not enough to sell it as a super difficult finish.

 

[Viskovitz]

I've always wondered this, but why do Vuelta mountain stages so
often just have a few small climbs and then the huge one to finish? There aren't road over many mountains, not enough passes or not enough big mountains close together?

The reason is... that's the philosophy of Unipublic. They want the race to be like that because they think the only climb that matters is the MTF. And they want to make the route not very difficult (so no big climbs before that) because they're afraid of riders, managers and press complaining about how hard it is or some BS.

On the other hand, Unipublic wants to engineer the route to ensure little time gaps between riders. I can quote Olano saying that the race splitting "to much" and far from the finish line is wrong.

There are roads over mountains, and big passes close to each other, and in a lot of different places. Obviously we don't have as many as France or Italy... but enough for 21 days of racing. Anyway, Le Tour always uses the same passes over and over.

Cordal is the toughest climb near there by far)

That's not true. The toughest climb is Collado Puerco. It starts in Pola de Lena as El Cordal, and his descent end in the top of El Cordal (so the route to l'Angliru is the same). It's 7,75km at 9,6&.Profile.

But since a picture is worth a thousand words, here we have some profiles of what can be done in Spain: